The Firefly Dance

by Sarah Addison Allen

  “Didn’t anyone stop to help you?” Ginger asked, perched on the edge of her seat. She reached out and took James’ hand.

  “Of course,” Sophie said impatiently. “One of which was Lorelei Horton in that fluorescent monstrosity she calls a car. But I didn’t need help. I’ve got the patch kit right here in my purse and as soon as I’ve cooled down I’ll fix it. Lord, but it’s hot out there.” She looked across the room. “Hey there, Beth. How are you?”

  Beth was leaning against the counter but stood up straight when Sophie unexpectedly spoke to her. “Not bad, Miss Sophie.”

  “Since you’re waiting on that little girl right there, would you mind getting me a glass of water?”

  “Of course I will,” Beth said.

  Sophie sat down next to Ginger. She patted the sides of her hair, then sighed and let her hands flop to her lap. Everyone was staring at her. Sophie looked at each of them. “I’m an old woman,” she finally said, shaking her head. “I don’t remember getting old and that’s God’s honest truth. But here I am, and I’m an old woman.”

  Vivian walked over and turned on the air conditioner. She pushed the broken piece of cinder block away from the door with her foot. With one more look and one final breath of the beautiful day, she closed the door, shutting out the sound of the highway.

  I’ll See You in My Dreams

  Great Aunt Sophie liked tight, no-fuss perms that sat close to her head, the curls as round as Christmas peppermints. It used to be that she could easily pedal over to the Fashionette for such a coif. But she retired her bicycle about three years ago. Her doctor said it was time. Of course, her doctor started saying it was time fifteen years ago. It just took that long for her to finally agree with him.

  I have a standing engagement with Great Aunt Sophie and, when it’s time for a perm, I leave early from work and drive her to the Fashionette, past the factory out on Clementine Highway. When she was able, she used to go for a wash and set every week, now she settles for a perm every couple of months. I pick her up at her house, and the first thing she always says to me is, “So, do you like working at Staler’s? Did you have a good day?”

  And I always answer, “It’s all right. A job, I guess,” leaving her to guess who actually buys those designer briefs and the boxers with chili peppers on them. She’s bound to know the men if I tell her.

  I sell men’s underwear at Staler’s department store. I have the dubious distinction of knowing what almost every man in town wears underneath. Sometimes, walking down Main Street, I imagine I’m getting sheepish looks from the men, especially the older ones. Like I know their secret.

  It was a fairly bold move for a factory town store like Staler’s to put a woman in charge of men’s underwear, but I guess they figured it was good plan when they found out that more women buy men’s underwear for their men than the men do for themselves. There was actually a study done somewhere. Great Aunt Sophie doesn’t believe me when I tell her this.

  “What kind of person would go up to a stranger and ask her if she buys her man his underwear?” Great Aunt Sophie says. Apparently she has no problem with asking me, though. She called me up last Sunday and said she’d just been to Staler’s with her friend Harriet, who still drives. She said she saw this ridiculous pair of men’s orange boxer shorts with big green dinosaurs on them that glow in the dark. “Tell me who buys those, Louise,” she said to me. “Tell me who actually buys that sort of thing.”

  I wanted to know what she and Harriet were doing wandering around in the men’s underwear department at Staler’s when she knows neither Mom nor I work there on Sundays.

  Sophie asks me to come in when I take her home from the Fashionette. It’s a feverish late September day. It’s the kind of hot that sticks to the sides of the mountains, like the colors in this particular Appalachian autumn. As soon as we walk to the kitchen, she opens the back door to let the breeze come in and stands there for a moment, looking out as if she sees someone. Then she turns around and begins to fuss around the kitchen, her feet whispering against the linoleum.

  Her kitchen smells like a combination of apples turning soft and the scent of fine linen napkins that have been locked away too long in cabinet drawers. The smell makes me feel good, like when I was young and Great Aunt Sophie wasn’t quite as old. But then it silently reprimands me for not coming to visit as often as I should. Shame on you, Louise, it says.

  “So tell me how you are,” Great Aunt Sophie says, going to the faded green pie safe in the corner and gingerly bringing out an apple pie. Maybe her stiff, knobby fingers are up to no good again. She doesn’t seem to trust them to carry the pie over to the counter. She cuts a piece right there and takes it to the microwave. This is all done before she’s even taken off her sweater, or exchanged her going-out eyeglasses for her at-home eyeglasses.

  “I’m fine, Aunt Sophie,” I say, sitting at the heavy wooden kitchen table covered with a finely-kept, flowered oilcloth, which she’s had for as far back as my memory stretches. There’s a huge bowl of apples on the table, waiting for her to do what she does to apples in the fall—can, bake, fry, stew, candy, dry, dip in caramel, marinate in sugar to pour over friendship bread. She keeps promising not to touch another apple recipe until the apples decide to peel themselves. But Sophie’s not that patient.

  She puts the piece of freshly microwaved pie in front of me. Warm curls rise up from it. “Smell that, Louise,” she says to me as she hands me a fork. “That’s what my heaven’s going to smell like. Apple pie. Hot apple pie . . . and leather shoes, new ones. The dancing kind.”

  I take a bite because I know she won’t move until I start eating. Just as soon as the fork reaches my mouth, she turns and goes to the kitchen drawer to do her eyeglasses exchange. She leans against the counter and rubs her eyes tiredly, at length, before she puts on her at-home eyeglasses.

  She sighs and pushes herself away from the counter then she takes off her sweater and ties a blue apron around her waist. “So tell me, how’s that best friend of yours, the one you knew in school? Sue? I haven’t seen her in a while.”

  “She’s fine, too. I saw her just yesterday. She’s pregnant,” I say as Great Aunt Sophie turns on the portable radio in her kitchen window. A big band tune comes out softly.

  “Pregnant again?” she asks over her shoulder as she starts making coffee in her new automatic drip. The air whooshes into the sealed coffee jar as she opens it. “How many will this make?”

  “Just three.” I take another bite of her pie. “Her husband wants a boy this time.”

  “Humph,” Great Aunt Sophie says. “Like he can control that.”

  I smile. Some things I just know I inherited from Great Aunt Sophie and no one else. “That’s what I say. She won’t listen. She’s in love.”

  “You’re a good girl, Louise. Have I ever told you that? You are. You need to find a nice man and have children. I’m not going to be around forever to tell you this, so you better hurry up.” Her automatic drip gurgles and she sways a little to the music as she brings a cup down from the cabinet.

  I watch her. Great Aunt Sophie isn’t the kind of person you would ever think of as a dancer, but she loves to dance. Not that she ever dances with anyone, but I know that if she’s having one of her good days, she’ll sometimes dance to her refrigerator and back when she cooks. And when she used to bring her bicycle out of her garage, she would sometimes dance with it all the way to the road.

  “I’m sure I’ll find a nice man some day, Aunt Sophie.”

  “Yes, yes. I suppose so. You’re only twenty-five. I’d like to see the day, that’s all.” She pours a cup of coffee and comes to sit beside me at the table.

  “Twenty-four,” I remind her, thinking that ever since I had that Yes-I’m-old-enough-to-have-coffee conversation with her several years ago, she always seems to make me older than I am whenever coffee is involved, even
though she never gives me any. I’m old enough to sell men’s underwear. I wonder what she would say if I tell her that.

  “I got married when I was twenty. I told you that once, didn’t I?” She has the creamy eggshell-thin coffee cup in both of her hands as she takes a sip.

  “No ma’am. I don’t recall that you did.”

  “My Harry. He was a good old soul. I had a dream about him.” She pauses then laughs. She sets her cup down and leans back in her chair as she puts a hand to her cheek. “When was that?” She shakes her head. “Ha! I can’t even remember. Maybe it was as close as last night.”

  “You had a dream about Harry?” I never knew my great-uncle. He died long before I was born.

  “I dreamed I was sixteen again and my hair was long and blond.” She pats the sides of her newly permed hair. It’s the purest silver you’ve ever seen, like a new nickel, and it smells something powerful. It makes my nose tingle when the breeze from the open doorway blows the smell my way.

  I look at Great Aunt Sophie carefully. “Your hair was long and blond?”

  She smiles, a tad mischievously. “Long, maybe. But not blond. But that’s what dreams are about sometimes, aren’t they? How you want things to be.” She nods to the plate in front of me. “Do you like the pie? Harriet’s apples weren’t great this year.”

  “The pie is wonderful,” I assure her.

  “Did I ever tell you how I met my Harry?” she suddenly asks, but distantly, like she’s asking someone else in the kitchen, someone behind her in the doorway.

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “Don’t be silly.” She’s definitely talking to me now. I recognize that tone. “I know I told you a long time ago. When you were little. Remember these things, Louise. They’re important.”

  It’s an art, I realize. Guilt is an art. And Great Aunt Sophie is a master artist. When are you getting married? Why don’t you stop by and see me? Didn’t you ever listen to me when you were little? I would never backtalk Great Aunt Sophie, but the answers are always there: In time, I do, and no. Sophie orbited my world when I was little, large and looming like a full July moon. I used to watch her carefully—the best way to avoid her was to always know where she was—but I never listened to her much. I should have known I was going to be tested later.

  “Yes ma’am,” I promise her.

  “All right, so listen up. There were three girls in our family—Anna, the oldest, me in the middle, and your grandmother Charlotte, the youngest,” Great Aunt Sophie begins, counting off each sister on a different crooked finger. “Anna married when she was seventeen to a boy over the state line in Tennessee. She had been married about two years when her first child came along. Mama and Daddy packed me and Charlotte up and sent us on a train to help her out with the baby.

  “Mama sent me with secret instructions to have an eye out for every little detail so I could tell her when I got home. Anna married into a family with money, you see. When Charlotte and I got there, the house was as big as any place I had ever seen. But everyone lived there. The whole family. Ma and Pa Coleman, Anna and her husband, another son and his wife, and two daughters, not to mention a couple of housekeepers. It seemed to me that they needed all that space because nobody was ever going to leave. And the family just kept growing. Charlotte and I were put in the same room, the only room they had left, I think.

  “It turns out Anna already had a woman to help with the baby, Evangeline, so Charlotte and I weren’t really needed. But Anna was happy to have us there and we spent a lot of time together. It was just like when we were girls. Anna was close to twenty then, I was sixteen and Charlotte was going on fifteen. We spent hours just walking around the orchard on the estate. Sometimes we’d go into town and people would remark on what pretty girls we were.”

  Sophie smiles at the memory. But then she shakes her head. “I always thought your grandmother was the prettiest of us three. I told you she had this beautiful head of golden hair, remember?”

  “I remember,” I say.

  “Somehow, the brown eyes we were all born with seemed to look better on her. Now, Anna was tall and stately and fit right in with money. I was somewhere in the middle, but there we were in this little town in Tennessee and suddenly I was a beauty. There were several dances in town and we were never wanting for a partner. Anna let us borrow her lipstick. Oh, those days, Louise,” she sighs. “Someday, when you’re old enough, you’re going to look back on your life and remember things that, even though you didn’t know it then, will make you know who you are now.”

  “I’m not so young,” I have to say.

  To that she just laughs. “Anyway, after we had stayed long enough, Mama and Daddy called for us to come back North Carolina. We were upset something terrible. We’d had the time of our lives. But then I remember Anna coming into the room and telling us that there was another dance that very night in town and we were all going to go. Of course that made everything all right because then we would get to say goodbye to everyone. We had been there almost three months. The whole summer.

  “I was wearing my best blue dress that night and my hair was pulled back with a ribbon. There was this boy, you see, that I thought I fancied and I wanted to look nice for him.” She laughs lightly, amused at herself. “What was his name? I can’t even remember. He always smelled like cloves because he chewed them to help this toothache he had.”

  “It wasn’t Harry?”

  “Nooo,” she says with elongated emphasis. “That night, someone new, someone I had never met before, asked me to dance. That was Harry. Oh, this is horrible to admit, but I didn’t want to dance with him. He was handsome enough, I suppose. His clothes were clean and starched, but old, I could tell. I had become a little high and mighty, spending all that time in that big house, living with one of the most respected families for miles around. But I didn’t have a good excuse not to dance with him, and I had to be polite. So we danced. And, Louise, it was like time stood still.”

  Aunt Sophie holds her hands out and, with effort, makes them freeze for a moment, as if it’s very important to her that I understand what she means. “He was such an incredible dancer. Never marry a man who can’t dance, Louise. Never do it. He was much taller than me but he moved like grace. Fast dances, slow dances, whatever the band played. His hands felt rough even though he barely touched me. I learned he lived on a farm with his family. He was nineteen and the oldest of eleven. We talked and talked and laughed and laughed. He told me he had come to all the dances I came to, but never had the nerve to ask me until then. That made my heart flip. I was having the best night of my life, and I can say that with confidence, Louise, because I’m old. You can’t say that now so don’t even try.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I say, but I think about it anyway.

  “We danced five dances in a row, then the band leader said goodnight and the band played I’ll See You in My Dreams. Harry took my hand and put something in it. It was a button, the little bone button I had lost off my sweater the first time I went into town with Anna and Charlotte. He said it was the first time he saw me. He worked afternoons at the local filling station and he said I walked right by him like a queen in a parade and my button fell right off. He was too shy to run after me, so he kept it in his pocket. He said he liked to take it out and think of me. That’s when he said he loved me. I didn’t know what to say. I started crying right then and there because I loved him, too. That’s the way things happened back then.”

  She pauses to have a sip of coffee and it seems like she’s going to stop right there. So I have to ask, “What happened next?”

  She shrugs. “I left the next morning. I was so sad I couldn’t say a word. And Mama always used to say I was awful to live with for the next few months. But then the next spring, Mama, Daddy, Charlotte and I went to church one Sunday and who should be there but Harry!”

  “Here?” I say, sm
iling at her as I lick my finger and press it against my plate to pick up the last few crumbs from the pie crust.

  “Yes, here. I couldn’t believe it myself. He was staying at the boarding house that used to be on Carberry Avenue, where the Burger King is now, and old Mr. Johnson had hired him at his filling station. I couldn’t go up and talk to him, of course, but Daddy went up and shook hands with him then introduced the rest of us. Charlotte knew who he was but I pinched her arm to stop her from saying anything. She said I left a bruise that lasted weeks.”

  “He came all the way up here just to be near you?” I shake my head. Of all the people I know, Great Aunt Sophie is the last person I would have suspected of harboring a romantic past.

  “Yesiree. He sold all he had, saved up for months, and came to Clementine, North Carolina because he loved me. He called on me a few days later and we started courting. We had to wait nearly three years before we married. He had to save up for a house. Daddy approved of him because he was such a hard worker, and always so polite. Daddy bought a car, his first, and Harry always knew what to do for it. He could fix anything. Old Mr. Johnson eventually let Harry buy him out. Of course, when Harry died, I sold the station to Harlen Duckett. It’s a good thing I never learned to drive, Louise. There’s too many memories in the smell of a gas station.”

  She squints then looks down into her coffee cup. “Harry died two days after our twenty-first wedding anniversary. Did I ever tell you that? Life is like living in a house and death is like walking out the door. It’s that simple. Harry walked out the door to go to work, and two hours later I got the call. It was a Thursday afternoon. But you want to know something? He loved more in his forty-four years than most people do in a lifetime. He did a lot of things well, Louise, but the thing he did the best was love me. How many people can say that?” She picks up her cup and takes another sip. “Not many, I think.”